Aurora
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3.8 • 52 Ratings
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
'What a saga! Scifi with honest, complex humanity, physics, biology, sociology' - Tom Hanks
'Aurora is a magnificent piece of writing, certainly Robinson's best novel since his mighty Mars trilogy, perhaps his best ever' - Guardian
Our voyage from Earth began generations ago.
Now, we approach our destination.
A new home.
Aurora.
Brilliantly imagined and beautifully told, Aurora is the work of a writer at the height of his powers.
'An accessible novel packed with big ideas, wonders, jeopardy and, at the end, a real emotional punch' SFX
'Aurora is Robinson's best book yet . . . Heart-wrenching, provocative' Scientific American
'Kim Stanley Robinson is one of science fiction's greats' Sunday Times
Novels by Kim Stanley Robinson:
Icehenge
The Memory of Whiteness
A Short, Sharp Shock
Antarctica
The Years of Rice and Salt
Galileo's Dream
2312
Shaman
Aurora
New York 2140
Red Moon
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This ambitious hard SF epic shows Robinson (Shaman) at the top of his game. Freya and her parents live aboard a starship that has traveled for generations and will soon reach Tau Ceti, a star about 12 light years from Earth's solar system. Freya's mother, Devi, is the de facto chief engineer, struggling to keep the ship's environment balanced until they reach a new world and, they hope, survive on it. But ecologies are delicate, resources are limited, and the laws of physics are immutable. Over the course of Freya's life, her community faces genuinely surprising struggles for survival, leading Freya to wonder whether it is too late to reconsider a question initially decided millions of miles away and centuries ago: should this ship have been launched in the first place? As always, Robinson is at his best when dealing with large populations, scientific questions, and logistics, and the very human characters are more than afterthoughts. Even an occasional lapse into preaching about the philosophical problems with space exploration can't mar this poignant story, which admirably stretches the limits of human imagination.
Customer Reviews
What happened?
Starts well: last generation colonists under survival pressure inside giant failing spacecraft. Chemical imbalances, biological consequences, political decisions.
But then there's a turn of events that makes you stop caring about any characters, the plot twists in 37 directions and becomes repetitive to the point of making you fast-scroll down, until there's nothing else.
Also suffers from "Jetson's Syndrome": there's spaceships and astronauts aplenty in this 27th century but everyone behaves as if it's still the 20th; same political outlook, no significant technological evolution other than spaceships, a complete blank on all the other areas of knowledge.
Great disappointment.